I Hope John Tortorella Didn’t Bother Unpacking

By the standards and practices of the Vegas Golden Knights, John Tortorella had it coming. His first three-game losing streak as the team's head coach was enough for Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon to decide he'd seen enough, and the fact that the three losses in question came in the Stanley Cup Finals mattered not. Team policy is team policy. Gerard Gallant, the team's first coach, got it after a four-game losing streak in 2020. Peter DeBoer, who replaced him, got it after a win that came after a three-game losing streak, but it still counts because the win came in the team's final game that season. Bruce Cassidy got canned with eight games left after a three-game losing streak. And now Torts. No wonder the Knights have the reputation they have. In fairness, this might have been predetermined, that Tortorella, who lives in Florida, was called out of three years' quasi-retirement to replace Cassidy and didn't want to relocate to Nevada. Maybe McCrimmon told him ahead of time this would be a temporary assignment, and sent him home with a lot of hoodies and tees and maybe even a souvenir skate sharpener for the grandkids. But Torts did say during the Finals run that he would like to coach in the NHL again, and the only open jobs are in noted hockey lunatic asylums in Edmonton and Toronto, and Tortorella would barely reach Christmas before pulling off his own head in a post-practice scrum and coating the gathered reporters in plasma. That's no way to go out, even for someone as polarizing as him.